The present invention relates to an image processing system, an image pickup apparatus, an image pickup method, an image reproducing apparatus, and an image reproducing method.
Image pickup apparatus that pick up an image of a subject and store the image on a storage medium have enabled sophisticated and all-purpose image pickup because of improvements in image processing capability, for example the performance of CPUs and other devices.
For example, an image with a high resolution can be obtained by simply increasing the number of pixels in image pickup. A slow-motion image with a high time resolution can be obtained by simply increasing vertical scanning frequency or horizontal scanning frequency.
A technique (for example Japanese Patent Laid-open No. Hei 9-107516) for obtaining the latter slow-motion image by multiplying the vertical scanning frequency of each frame by an integer and thus performing high-speed image pickup with a high image pickup rate is known.
However, such a technique only performs high-speed image pickup forcefully relying on the processing capacity of an image pickup apparatus, and therefore cannot perform high-speed image pickup itself when there is some limitation to one of hardware resources, for example the frequency band of an image transfer path, the capacity of an encoder, or the capacity of a storage medium.